For the attention of anyone who has previously downloaded our Cygwin/XFree86 package, or anyone who wants to experiment with running Linux thin-client sessions from Windows workstations without having to play around with dual-booting or network-booting: A new version of CygXF86 is available from http://osie.sourceforge.net/CygXF86.zip CygXF86 allows you to run a Linux thin-client session (i.e. an X-Windows session) within Windows. If you download the zip file and follow the very simple installation instructions, then you will get a "Cygwin" icon on your desktop. Double-clicking this icon will start up an X server and connect to a Linux application server on the network. You can use this (almost) as though it were a native Linux terminal, but you can switch between Windows and Linux just by pressing Alt-Tab. The licences are (AFAICR) a mixture of GPL/LGPL and X11, so it's all properly free software including the bits we've written (which are GPL). This package is similar to what you will get by downloading Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree86 directly from cygwin.com, except that: 1) It will take up a lot less disk space and will be faster to download. 2) It will automatically determine your screen size and colour depth. This should now work under 95/98/Me and NT/2K. 3) It will not be confused by any dial-up interfaces you may have. 4) It is only suitable for use as a thin-client terminal. It doesn't include anything else from the Cygwin distribution such as bash, gcc etc. This is the reason for (1). This is a beta-release. Please send any bug reports and/or patches to me. Please note the requirements: you do need a working Linux server that will respond to XDMCP broadcasts. You can test this from any Linux box by logging on as root and running "/usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 -broadcast". If you get a GUI login screen appearing, then all's well. The .zip file is approximately 18MB. You can check that you downloaded it correctly by using md5sum - you should get: $ md5sum CygXF86.zip 43372284b60e9e386f91bad60f5f6a12 CygXF86.zip Ideal for anyone who wants to sneak a Linux thin-client server into their school network - now you can give everyone the ability to run Linux thin-client sessions without having to disrupt the Windows workstations! Michael Brown http://www.fensystems.co.uk/
This is a beta-release. Please send any bug reports and/or patches to me.
Please note the requirements: you do need a working Linux server that will respond to XDMCP broadcasts. You can test this from any Linux box by logging on as root and running "/usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 -broadcast". If you get a GUI login screen appearing, then all's well.
Unless someone happens to have a machine called "dolphin" configured that way they are going to need to alter fs_parse.awk either with the correct machine name/IP address or to replace "-query dolphin" with "-broadcast". -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
Unless someone happens to have a machine called "dolphin" configured that way they are going to need to alter fs_parse.awk either with the correct machine name/IP address or to replace "-query dolphin" with "-broadcast".
I got 'unable to resolve host: dolphin' and got stuck (I'm fairly new at all this). Please, a quick explanation of what I need to do? Which file do I find '-query dolphin' in? I will then change it to '-broadcast'. Thanks -- Matt __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find a job, post your resume. http://careers.yahoo.com
Unless someone happens to have a machine called "dolphin" configured that way they are going to need to alter fs_parse.awk either with the correct machine name/IP address or to replace "-query dolphin" with "-broadcast".
I got 'unable to resolve host: dolphin' and got stuck (I'm fairly new at all this).
Please, a quick explanation of what I need to do? Which file do I find '-query dolphin' in? I will then change it to '-broadcast'.
It's most likely c:\cygwin\fs_parse.awk assuming you used the default install options. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
Unless someone happens to have a machine called "dolphin" configured that way they are going to need to alter fs_parse.awk either with the correct machine name/IP address or to replace "-query dolphin" with "-broadcast". I got 'unable to resolve host: dolphin' and got stuck (I'm fairly new at all this). Please, a quick explanation of what I need to do? Which file do I find '-query dolphin' in? I will then change it to '-broadcast'.
My mistake. Correct version of fs_parse.awk is attached. Save into C:\Cygwin and all should be well. A new version is currently being uploaded, but changing the fs_parse.awk file is all that is required. I will e-mail again when the new version has finished uploading. Thanks to everyone who reported this - Alan Davies got the credit in the ChangeLog since he got there first! :-) Michael
On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Michael Brown wrote:
Unless someone happens to have a machine called "dolphin" configured that way they are going to need to alter fs_parse.awk either with the correct machine name/IP address or to replace "-query dolphin" with "-broadcast". I got 'unable to resolve host: dolphin' and got stuck (I'm fairly new at all this). Please, a quick explanation of what I need to do? Which file do I find '-query dolphin' in? I will then change it to '-broadcast'. My mistake. Correct version of fs_parse.awk is attached. Save into C:\Cygwin and all should be well. A new version is currently being uploaded, but changing the fs_parse.awk file is all that is required. I will e-mail again when the new version has finished uploading.
New version is now uploaded and has the md5sum: $ md5sum CygXF86.zip a65370c911260281618ca3c139e11c73 CygXF86.zip If you already downloaded the old version (with an md5sum of 43372284b60e9e386f91bad60f5f6a12), then just save the attached file as C:\Cygwin\fs_parse.awk and you will have an up-to-date version. If you have a version that has any other md5sum, then you managed to download while I was halfway through uploading - sorry. Use rsync to finish the download for maximum efficiency.
Thanks to everyone who reported this - Alan Davies got the credit in the ChangeLog since he got there first! :-)
An explanation of the bug (from the reply I sent to Alan): "My mistake. Dolphin is the name of my main workstation. The script should use "-broadcast" instead of "-query dolphin", but I changed it at one point because I have several servers that accept broadcast queries and I wanted to force it to connect to Dolphin while I was using Cygwin to do some actual work on a Win98 laptop. Looking at the CVS logs, I see that I missed this change because it was included along with the addition of "-nowinkill -unixkill -emulate3buttons" in fs_parse.awk. Oh well." Sorry, I don't normally release software that does absolutely nothing! On the plus side, this demonstrates nicely how open-source works; three people find the bug and two people fix it before it gets caught by internal QA! :-) (Internally, of course, dolphin exists and so you don't see the problem...) On a side note, I'd be interested to know how many people download this and find it useful. Michael
Michael, Thanks for fixing that. I was blown away with how easy it is to install and get going. Nice job! I look forward to demoing it to folks that I support. Excellent. -- Matt __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com
Just one very minor thing. The current startup batch file won't go beyond the initial message if your Windows install is not itself on drive c: (e.g. on my system which runs Win2K from E:) That's because cygwin.bat assumes that c: is the current drive, which it won't be if the command processor was invoked from a Windows installation on another drive. Simple fix (and harmless to people who have everything on C:). Insert the line C: into cygwin.bat immediately before the cd \cygwin line. Then the batch file will continue correctly, no matter where Windows itself lives. Michael --------------------------------------------------------- Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/
On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Michael Beddow wrote:
Just one very minor thing. The current startup batch file won't go beyond the initial message if your Windows install is not itself on drive c: (e.g. on my system which runs Win2K from E:) That's because cygwin.bat assumes that c: is the current drive, which it won't be if the command processor was invoked from a Windows installation on another drive. Simple fix (and harmless to people who have everything on C:). Insert the line C: into cygwin.bat immediately before the cd \cygwin line. Then the batch file will continue correctly, no matter where Windows itself lives.
Thanks. Looking at the code now, I'm not quite sure why it needs to be hard-coded to C:\Cygwin. I'm sure there used to be a reason, but unfortunately it hasn't always been under CVS so now I can't find out why. AFAICS, the only thing that is now location-dependent is the PATH environment variable, which has to include the ...\cygwin and ...\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin paths. It might work to say set PATH=%0\..;%PATH%;%0\..\cygwin\bin;%0\..\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin and delete the "cd \cygwin" line. I will try this out at some point. If it works, it means it might also be possible to install onto a network mapped drive. (There's no feasible way for batch files to run directly from UNC paths because a UNC path cannot be a working directory for cmd.exe...). Michael
I've now done a lot more playing around with the CygF86 package Michael made available and it's hard to overstate its importance for people who want to give thin client working a try alongside Windows. In particular, packaging it so that it installs easily and without the large overhead of the full Cygwin shamozzle is a splendid idea and a great service to the rest of us. One further very minor point. The statement that the terminal server side of things will work "out of the box" on a current Mandrake distro is almost correct, but not quite, as I've just verified by doing a special clean install of Mk 8.1. There is one essential small modification that needs making (plus another one the may be desirable for some people) 1) Out of the box, a Mandrake installation will not serve an xdm login prompt to any remote X server. To make it do so, you need to add a line to /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config After the line DisplayManager._0.setup: /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0 you need to add a line whose left hand side reads DisplayManager.*.setup: and whose right hand side is the fully path to a valid Xsetup file. The easiest way to manage this is to make up a new name and insert it into this new entry, giving eg DisplayManager.*.setup: /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_Remote then save the file and, still in the /etc/X11/xdm/ directory, do cp Xsetup_0 Xsetup_Remote Once that's done, your CygWin remote X-servers will get their xdm prompts. You can then tweak the contents of the Xsetup_Remote file you just created if you want to, but it's not necessary to do so. 2) The default setup starts an X session on the console when xdm is started on the terminal server. This can be a handy way of initially checking that the xdm setting are correct, but once you've done that, it isn't always desirable to give your terminal server the overhead of running an X-server environment locally as well as serving up sessions to remote clients. To avoid the automatic local X startup, you need to edit /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers and comment out the line :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X -deferglyphs 16 Once that's done, typing xdm at the console will apparently do nothing, but from then on the daemon will be ready to serve remote clients while the console still stays in text mode. This could be quite important if you want to maximise the perceived performance of the terminal server when showing off its capabilities to the sceptics and the ignorant. Michael --------------------------------------------------------- Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/
On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Michael Beddow wrote:
One further very minor point. The statement that the terminal server side of things will work "out of the box" on a current Mandrake distro is almost correct, but not quite, as I've just verified by doing a special clean install of Mk 8.1. There is one essential small modification that needs making (plus another one the may be desirable for some people)
It was accurate at the time of writing (Mdk8.0) :-)
1) Out of the box, a Mandrake installation will not serve an xdm login prompt to any remote X server. To make it do so, <snip>
Thanks for this. Which *dm are you using: xdm, kdm or gdm? I'm using kdm and I found an entry in /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc which, in a default installation of Mdk8.1, reads: [Xdmcp] Enable=false Changing this to Enable=true has the desired effect. In 8.0, kdm used the xdm configuration files for most settings instead of its own kdmrc file. It's probably worth adding a file "AppServers.txt" with instructions on how to ensure that XDMCP is set up to work on the servers, isn't it? It would be nice if this could include instructions for multiple distributions, even if the instructions are just "It will work as-is with a standard installation of this distribution". Can I use your e-mail as a basis for this file? Also, if anyone can give instructions for other distributions besides Mandrake, please let me know and I'll add them in. Michael
participants (4)
-
Mark Evans -
Matt Johnson -
Michael Beddow -
Michael Brown